Monsieur Hire

Synopsis

A French man spies on a lovely younger woman across the way. When he's spotted by the woman shortly after being questioned by the police about a local murder, the man simple life becomes more complicated.

An extremely peculiar film with an equally peculiar character! Director Patrice Leconte doesn't tell a story, he uncorks it and lets it breathe!

Monsieur Hire (Michel Blanc) is a strange and unlikable man his motives seem transparent enough when we learn of his favorite new pastime! While the obvious sticks out like a sore thumb and takes up the majority of the film be well advised its just the tip of the iceberg!

Between the murder and multiple twists you won't know which end is up till the end of the grand finale!

Taut and lean storytelling in luscious and sensual style. What this film manages to achieve in a mere 75 minutes is astonishing.

Monsieur Hire is a superbly acted, impossible love story, fuelled by obsession, voyeurism and death. The titular Hire is an intriguing character of whom our perception gradually changes as the narrative unfolds.

Monsieur Hire is beautifully melancholic if you allow it to be and extraordinarily tragic in ways I didn't expect. That final scene will stay with me quite some time.

Allow this film to get to you and you'll be in for a rare cinematic delight.

A spellbinding psychological drama adapted from one of the master of the forms novels, Patrice Leconte tells a love story, a tale of obsession and a murder investigation with some of the most beautiful mise-en-scene you'll ever see. It's the kind of sensuous film Perfume should have been.

A young girl has been found murdered, and Monsieur Hire is high on the detective's radar. Why?

Specifically, a taxi driver has seen someone running towards the apartment complex where Mr. Hire lives. More generally - no one likes Mr. Hire. You know the type, don't you? Every neighborhood has one; mid forties, bachelor, weird looking, old fashioned but sharp dressed, doesn't speak to anyone. Persons like that sparks rumors.

Monsieur Hire (a superb Michel Blanc) meanwhile spends his afternoons and nights watching the girl in the apartment across from his. When she finds out, she is at first grossed out by it but then slowly warms to the idea and, to Mr. Hire's delight, starts befriending him. All good…

letterboxd.com/cc_baxter/list/scavenger-hunt/ ------------------------------------------------ The movie depicts a relationship that starts off feeling a bit like a role reversal of Kieslowski's "Short film about love", with Monsieur Hire, a monsieur so creepy he reminded me of the yellow dude from "Sin City", spying on a cute young neighbour. Being the prime suspect of a murder basically because of how weird he acts, Monsieur Hire seems to care more about winning his love interest's heart than defending himself against the accusations. Avoiding being specific, I'd say there is quite an ugly turn of events towards the end, with a couple of very nice twists that left me with a lot of conflicting emotions when the end credits started rolling. I need at least a couple of days to decide how good this actually was.

Here again the trope of male erotic obsession dooming the man to fall pray to female contrivances. Unlike a typical noir, however, the femme is much more than a deadly plotter and the man much more than a mere gullible blinded by desire (Body Heat).

In pace with the sad, intimist tone of Monsieur Hire, what the title character brings is not gullibleness, but resignation. Hire is completely aware about the trap he has fallen into, but being a loner and almost a ghost in the world, either disliked or ignored, he's willing to compromise and accept the imperfect affection from the woman he loves even under unlikely and unfair circumstances.

'Monsieur Hire' is a film where you can find elements of horror, mystery, romance and comedy blending with each other and the result is a really endearing piece of work.

This is a film that is majorly about the deceptiveness of appearances. 'Monsieur Hire explores the distinctions between what appears to be the truth and what is the actual truth, both in terms of facts and in terms of the nature of characters. Patrice Leconte uses the the screenplay and his camera to play around with the viewers with certain misleading shots and by deliberately withholding information. Certain ideas get set up in the minds of the viewer, but these ideas get undercut and turned on their heads with the…

The film's short length means that many things aren't as developed as you wish they were, but what is there is captivating and though provoking both as a nice little mystery, but also as a character study of M. Hire.

Monsieur Hire is quite the unusual character. We are introduced to him with a conversation with an detective where they are discussing why people just don't like him very much and how that suits him because he doesn't like people very much either. You might feel for the character when being thrown into that conversation, but afterwards we start to get our own sense of just how peculiar a character he truly is. He is always dressed in a buttoned up manner and carries himself with the way he moves and look on his face like he thinks he is better than the others. He has many odd daily rituals and one in particular is borderline sociopathic. Then there is…